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10/28/2014 2:42PM

Kara Walker’s Giant Sphinx at Domino Sugar Factory

Kara Walker's 'A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby' transforms the former Domino Sugar Factory with a colossal sphinx in the artist's first large-scale public work. This video originally ran on May 12, 2014.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

... I ... were mm mm you ... ay ay mm mm mm ... great art ... puts you in a place for you to think firmly about where we've come from ... and what kind of society are we going to create together ... it puts you in Venice based have difficult conversations ... I then Pastor Nasscom the President's artistic director of creative time ... and we are the commissioner in the present era of Kara Walker's latest most ambitious trade after ... so here we are in Williamsburg on the waterfront in Brooklyn ... at the former home ... of the domino sugar ... factory and in eighteen seventies ... over half of the sugar United States was produced here ... at Domino when people come into the domino sugar warehouse ... the first to be greeted with a procession of about four ft tall ... sculptures of young ... black boys curing baskets of bounty ... some of them are caster sugar ... some of them are covered in sugar ... and cast another materials ... and those boys leave this on a procession ... to the great Sphinx behind me ... it is about seventy feet tall I think ninety feet long ... almost forty feet wide ... and she actually is made out of three hundred and thirty ... enormous cubes of styrofoam and have a team of about twenty MasterCard verse that worked ... with ... care on this project ... and that once they work hard we have another team of people ... that were working on creating noise sugar concoction sees cars lorries ... and pouring and painting ... sugar over of the great Sphinx many people sent us ... this could never be built ... yet here we ... you might stand by them said oh my God it's so beautiful and so awe inspiring and I it's true ... that it's also not only looking at the sweetest part but say of ... human nature also takes a look at the ugliest part of ... human nature when we think about ... slavery and slavery of course is not within the past ... human trafficking is so enormous all around the world today is is is always playing with these dichotomy ... that keep us guessing all the time and I think of something that ... great artwork does it keeps you guessing ... she's really trying to encourage us to think ... about not only attribute the people of the past ... the recognize what's going on ... their present day and how are we going to change the situation ... all we can fix this problem ... and restore people's lives destroy the freedom in the spring ... a ... mm mm ...